Note: It's not actually guaranteed that enemies will drop RarePrefix/RareSuffix gear. There is a *very* slim chance that other items can drop. In the above images, only one pure white item dropped and no yellow items dropped.

I have examined the changes to gameengine.dbr you have made. So it seems you have changed the values to 5000000 and 0.0001 and respectively for rareBoth entries and all others.

Firstly, I assume that these values are relative odds. So in this example:

Why 5000000 in particular? As well, what's stopping us from putting 0 instead of 0.0001? Is it an engine limitation?

Aside: What is the significance of the brokenOnlyModifier with respect to the enemy's strength? Does it mean the enemy gets equipped with nothing and hence drops nothing, or is equipped with some (undetermined) equipment but drops nothing because it breaks?

Why 5000000 in particular? As well, what's stopping us from putting 0 instead of 0.0001? Is it an engine limitation?

Aside: What is the significance of the brokenOnlyModifier with respect to the enemy's strength? Does it mean the enemy gets equipped with nothing and hence drops nothing, or is equipped with some (undetermined) equipment but drops nothing because it breaks?

For some reason, zero is treated as non-zero in this field. I don't know the exact value it's set to when you put a zero there, but it definitely isn't zero. :P I had originally tested the mod with zero there but the drops weren't making sense (e.g., non-Rare gear was still pretty common). Of course, even with 5000000 vs 0.0001, it's still possible to get non-Rare gear, but it's much less likely than it was with a zero.

So Broken equipment is essentially White equipment with no affixes that when it drops is hidden from player-view and despawns almost immediately. It has the same stats as regular gear (usually, sometimes Broken gear is purely cosmetic like Karroz's equipment) but so as not to overwhelm the player in loot and so as not to lag the game with an overabundance of loot, it's just removed from existence when it no longer matters. In Titan Quest, you could actually drop and use Broken gear, particularly during lower levels. It was Grey gear, 'worse' than White (Common) gear.

Edit: As to your assumption about the way the mod works:

So these values are all Modifiers. They are a multiplier for relative values in different loot tables. If I actually wanted to eliminate the chance of ever getting anything other than Rare gear, I would go into every loottable in the game and set everything other than Rare/Rare to 0 (which would work) and set Rare/Rare to some nonzero value. However, this is a hell of a lot more work. Probably hundreds of files would need to be changed and if droprates were ever adjusted by an official patch, I'd need to repeat all that effort again. So I took the easy way out, and modified a single file that I knew had to exist because there was a difference between the difficulties in terms of how 'rare' Rare gear was. This made the mod much easier to recreate as Crate released updates to the game and, in most cases, is outright forward-compatible with future updates. Plus it's a lot easier to merge this mod into other mods by doing things this way.

Edit 2: Here's an example of a loottable that would be modified by the above multipliers:

So the idea is to bump rareBothPrefixSuffix up to a really high number and everything else down to a really low number...actually, because players don't ever see Broken Equipment, it's actually fine for the purposes of the mod if it drops, but that's beside the point. So I multiply the '4' by '5,000,000' to get an extraordinarily high value (20 million) that already dwarfs everything else in the table...and then I shrink those other values down even more just for good measure (at most, 9.5 as is the case for Broken Loot). So, for instance, if all there was was double rare loot and Broken loot, you'd have a 9.5/20000009.5 chance of getting a Broken thing to drop, and a 20000000/20000009.5 chance of getting a Rare/Rare item to drop.

In reality, this has actually caused an overabundance of loot for sure, which is why the screenshots in the first post are so rich with evidence as to the mod functioning as I described. A good polishing up of the mod would make Broken loot more likely, so that players weren't overwhelmed by a tidalwave of gear.

Edit T H R E E:

I think I may finally understand why zero doesn't work in the modifier field. In Grim Dawn, most modifiers are essentially + X% to whatever is being modified. +0% is still a 1.0x multiplier to the original value, and +0.0001% is a 1.0001x multiplier. So I may actually be counteracting myself a bit. I'm not sure, but it's not hugely relevant; the mod definitely works either way! +5000000% will do that.

If I actually wanted to eliminate the chance of ever getting anything other than Rare gear, I would go into every loottable in the game and set everything other than Rare/Rare to 0 (which would work) and set Rare/Rare to some nonzero value. However, this is a hell of a lot more work. Probably hundreds of files would need to be changed and if droprates were ever adjusted by an official patch, I'd need to repeat all that effort again. So I took the easy way out, and modified a single file that I knew had to exist because there was a difference between the difficulties in terms of how 'rare' Rare gear was. This made the mod much easier to recreate as Crate released updates to the game and, in most cases, is outright forward-compatible with future updates. Plus it's a lot easier to merge this mod into other mods by doing things this way.

It would indeed be excruciatingly painful and infeasible to do that manually. However, I think it can be automated. It seems that the .db files are in plain text format, and can be edited using a text editor. Also, the loot-table data in plain text format seems to be well structured. I conjecture that a simple program that scours through the relevant directories and overwrites the values for the appropriate rows can do the job.

That would mean the mod modifies the loot-table file for all items (that can have affixes), which would of course make integration with other mods non-trival, requiring deliberate cooperation and effort.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ceno

Edit T H R E E:

I think I may finally understand why zero doesn't work in the modifier field. In Grim Dawn, most modifiers are essentially + X% to whatever is being modified. +0% is still a 1.0x multiplier to the original value, and +0.0001% is a 1.0001x multiplier. So I may actually be counteracting myself a bit. I'm not sure, but it's not hugely relevant; the mod definitely works either way! +5000000% will do that.

I did a summary of the modifiers in structured, table format. Blank entries indicate missing entries (rather than zero-entries). They are from gdx1's "gameengine.dbr":

Have a look at the table above and see what insights, on how exactly these modifiers work, you might get from it.

EDIT:
Other than in gameengine.dbr and the loottable files for items, is there anything else that influences affixes' appearances? From one of the patches onwards, in later levels you no longer see whites anymore. What gives rise to this?